KIDZONET delivers the World’s First SaaS Solution to Protect Our Children

CUSTOMER

Launched in third quarter of 2020 and as a world first, KIDZONET is a SaaS service for ISPs providing filtering of online content to ensure the safety and protection of children. Parents can use either a web browser or an Android or iOS app to customize settings and restrict content based on their requirements. It provides a simple user interface (UI) for choosing specific filters in Arabic, English, French, and Urdu. KIDZONET’s features include safe home internet browsing, content blocking, screen time management, malware protection, and a comprehensive set of predefined internet filtering profiles.

CHALLENGE

“We identified a gap in the area of online protection for children,” says Sabrina Joumani, Operations Director at KIDZONET. “While there are many parental control solutions on the market, they either require an agent or software installation on each device or can be quite complicated to set up and use. To address these issues, we decided to build KIDZONET, a SaaS security solution offered by ISPs with predefined controls automating the safety and protection of children.”

While KIDZONET was making good progress with developing the solution and negotiating with ISPs across the Middle East for their launch in third quarter of 2020, they needed a partner who could architect, build, and manage a highly-available and scalable cloud platform to support their SaaS solution.

“We had already decided that AWS was the right cloud platform for KIDZONET,” states Abdelfatah Hissouf, Technical Manager at KIDZONET. “But we needed a managed services partner with architecture and DevOps capabilities to help us create the underlying architecture that would meet the demands of our customers—the ISPs—and the end-users of the service. And we didn’t just want anyone, we wanted to partner with the best in the field.”

SOLUTION

Bespin, an AWS Premier Consulting and Managed Service Partner, was recommended to KIDZONET by AWS. Leveraging their extensive cloud and DevOps experience, the Bespin team architected and deployed a highly-available, automated SaaS environment for the KIDZONET app, using AWS platform capabilities to deliver optimal efficiency at the desired price point.

Bespin’s development team containerized the application—using cross-functional Kubernetes Pods and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)—providing a scalable and highly-available control plane spanning multiple availability zones to eliminate a single point of failure.

Amazon EKS is used to run Kubernetes Pods, a cluster of one or more containers with shared storage and networks enabling seamless data sharing and communications within a specified zone. These pods provide high-level abstraction—simplifying deployment, replication, and scaling—and ensure KIDZONET users can filter content according to their parental control preferences.

The solution leverages the capabilities of AWS SageMaker, a fully-managed service enabling developers to quickly build, tune, and deploy machine learning (ML) models for real-time reclassification.

Bespin uses Terraform to provision and manage the AWS cloud infrastructure, eliminating manual configuration errors and saving time by simplifying the replication of development, test, and production environments. The kidzonet.io domain is registered with Amazon Route 53, managing regional traffic and providing a cost-effective and reliable way of seamlessly routing users to the correct KIDZONET domain.

RESULTS & BENEFITS

“AWS is a vast, complex platform with a range of solutions and options,” says Ilia Suslonov, Head of R&D at KIDZONET. “Without a lot of experience, it can be difficult to choose the right options and deploy a secure product based on AWS standards and best practices.”

During the project, Bespin identified areas where the KIDZONET team had previously misconfigured some of the AWS services resulting in unnecessarily high costs. By optimizing the configuration, Bespin was able to realize cost savings of over 40% for KIDZONET.

“Bespin provided what we needed in terms of a secure, well-architected, and automated solution with the optimal cost model,” adds Hissouf. “As a startup with limited AWS experience, we needed someone who would hold our hand and guide us through the process. The Bespin team’s experience and expertise were evident from the outset, giving us the confidence we needed in both the platform and our ability as KIDZONET to successfully launch the service and live up to the expectations of our ISP customers and their end-users.”

“We’ve been working with Bespin for almost one year now,” summarizes Hissouf, “and they’ve definitely lived up to our expectations as a flexible and transparent partner. They always listen before sharing their knowledge, helping us understand the benefits—or disadvantages—of one scenario over another from a cost, technical, or operational perspective. Bespin’s international presence, industry analyst recognition, and technical depth in terms of AWS knowledge, skills, and tools gives us confidence that KIDZONET will perform as planned to protect our children and youth.”